Context is an important part of understanding the meaning of natural language, but most neuroimaging studies of meaning use isolated words and isolated sentences with little context. In this study, we examined whether the results of neuroimaging language studies that use out-of-context stimuli generalize to natural language. We find that increasing context improves the quality of neuroimaging data and changes where and how semantic information is represented in the brain. These results suggest that findings from studies using out-of-context stimuli may not generalize to natural language used in daily life